The Locker Combination

Jim Emerson, at his terrific blog Scanners, posts about “The Hurt Locker” and, in particular, about differing perceptions of it—his and Nile Gardiner’s of the Daily Telegraph. Jim contrasts Gardiner’s claim that the movie sends a conservative message (with “its willingness to portray the US military presence in Iraq in an overwhelmingly sympathetic light, and the al-Qaeda-backed enemy as barbaric and fundamentally evil. There are no shades of gray…”) with his own view, that “the moral world of ‘The Hurt Locker’ is, contrary to what Gardiner writes, entirely shades of gray. That’s what it’s about: trying to differentiate friendlies from hostiles in a world where it’s nearly impossible to tell from moment to moment which is which.”

I think they’re both right—that the movie derives its richness, and its message (and it sure has one), from the overlay of differing perspectives. On the one hand, it does show Iraq to be infested with moral, or immoral, monsters—people who kill children to fill their corpses with bombs, or who compel an unwilling man to become a suicide bomber—and shows that the American soldiers who are attempt to defuse such bombs and to capture or to kill the bombers would sooner die than pull the trigger unwarrantedly soon. On the other, exactly as Jim says, it shows that the soldiers, whose mission is morally unambiguous in its goals, is grievously ambiguous in its practicalities. The movie is centered on three soldiers (plus one at the outset), each of whom experiences, and represents, a different result of their grueling mission: one is killed, one is hurt, one survives, and one is addicted to warfare. The tragedy that Bigelow depicts is that of military actions that are in inherent contradiction with their aims, and of soldiers who are thereby condemned to attempt the impossible.

Sure, the bomb-planters come off as monsters. But the movie’s wider implications emerge with the recognition that the world is full of monsters—but that it would be self-destructive for the United States to assume the right and the responsibility to rid the world of them (and would also suggest precisely the kind of war-addiction that the movie dramatizes). So, yes, “The Hurt Locker” is definitely a liberal movie—especially in the general sense of suggesting that wisdom and justice consist in learning to accept the existence of evil. But it’s a very particular kind of liberal movie: it suggests that the United States faces dangers that are indeed self-destructive; the question of Iraqis and their well-being is secondary to the story. It is, in effect, a liberal movie without guilt; and, I think, this fact accounts, at least in part, for its widespread acclaim.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.